Wednesday, December 03, 2014

Deflationary collapse is underway

As a reader of Gail Tverberg's blog Our Finite World, I am privy to the fact that our world is soon collapsing. This is an open secret expounded in broad daylight and even in a friendly commercial-free environment, yet most people will never grasp it. The masses will starve to death or otherwise perish in the collapse thinking it is a political problem, and if only we had voted a different party into power who would have made some better decisions, things would have worked out. That is nonsense because we are facing a physical and ecological problem, to which there is no political solution. While I would love to be proven wrong, I have almost as much confidence in Gail's prediction of imminent collapse as the Second Law of thermodynamics, to which it is closely related. People who think sustainability is possible or renewables can save us have basically no knowledge of these issues. Likewise for people who obsess over climate change, which is rather like preparing to fight World War II before World War I. Read Gail's posts and comments, check her references and especially pay attention to the way she replies to all comments and convincingly debunks any kind of optimism, and it shall be intuitive to you too that we are collapsing.

I don't expect anyone to believe this simply because I say so. The impossibility of continuing our industrial civilization cannot be expressed in a single indicator or a few sentences. Declining EROEI comes close, but as Gail often points out, EROEI is not the whole story. You have to be willing to look at the whole picture and the various ways we are running into diminishing returns, which is something very few people can be bothered with. You have to understand concepts such as Liebig's law of the minimum, White's law, Jevon's paradox, the Constructal law, the concept of dissipative structures, the Maximum Power Principle and the Seneca cliff. You have to understand that life is in the business of entropy maximization, and now doing such a fabulously good job at it that the party will inevitably be over soon.

The meaning of life (at the level of physics, which rules biology) is to produce entropy. We are dissipative structures who came into being because entropy is created faster by our existence, considering the whole system. Dissipative structures arise in response to energy differentials. Our economy is also a dissipative system, whose function is to create entropy out of fossil hydrocarbons, which represent the greatest energy differential known to man. That is the only thing our economy knows how to do at this point, and when it fails to grow anymore it will collapse. Once again, you have to learn more about all these concepts to understand why it MUST collapse. Then you will understand that we need to preserve the whole industrial system to have any of it, which requires exponential growth since the whole thing is built on debt. Growth is no longer possible due to diminishing returns, so our economy must collapse. In time, other dissipative structures will emerge, but they will not be as grand or complex because the energy available to them is much too diffuse to produce anything like our industrial civilization. And all this glory was brought down by low oil prices, which is the proximate limit that we cannot defeat. Peak oil precipitated by low oil prices is exactly what Gail predicted (in December 2013 she explained why “oil prices don’t rise high enough” is the real limit), and it is happening now!

And not just oil, but all major commodities are now subject to deflation. Coal is also critically important, of course, and it is becoming unprofitable to extract as well. Deflationary collapse is thus already underway. The oil price will not go back up to the needed level of $100 or more per barrel. Instead, it will continue to decline until we are dead. If the oil price does go back up, it will only be a brief and useless spike because the world economy can no longer sustain such high prices. This is not a matter of OPEC limiting production, because that would have been futile anyway. The financial system is the operating system that the hardware of our civilization runs on, and it is totally dependent on growth to function at all. At some point within the next few years this system will seize up, leading to broken industrial supply lines, and there will be a forced localization of our economy. Since we can produce almost nothing locally in a world dependent on globalization, there will be immense suffering and a huge die-off. Any survivors will be limited to Stone Age technology or at best manual agriculture. The number of survivors could be as low as 100 million or probably no more than 10% at best.

There is nothing we can do to save industrial civilization or the bulk of humanity. Any attempt to prepare at a societal level will run afoul of the reflexivity trap and accelerate the problem by engendering fear and desperation. Any individual coping strategy is so fraught with risks as to be meaningless. You can prepare in various ways if you feel like it, but there is no guarantee it will do you any good the day business as usual (the legendary "BAU") ends. The end of BAU also means the end of all social movements, so our work as antifeminists will be done. Peak oil will destroy our enemies as surely as it will destroys us.

The best thing we can do now is to enjoy what we have until it is gone. Be thankful for the wonderful wealth we have. Marvel at the amenities of industrial civilization and the power of your hundreds of personal energy slaves. That is arguably not a bad thing to do even if I am wrong. Most people think of civilization as a permanent state that they simply take for granted. They think they will have access to things like hot showers, dentistry, pharmaceuticals, security and plenty of food as long as they live. The Olduvai theory tells us the lifespan of industrial civilization is more like 100 years, and even if it drags out a bit longer it will have been a mere blip. We shall soon find out if this turns out to be right. I think 2015 will be the year of the peak. This prediction will fail if commodity prices go back up and stay there, but that isn't happening, is it?

It sounds like Lex Berge has come to America: in spite of the article's title, the accused never specifically made threats against Officer Wilson---in fact, he wasn't saying much more than half these 'protestors' were saying here.

That's clearly another prosecution done in bad faith. It goes to show that your prosecutors are dishonest scumbags, just like ours. Jaleel Tarik Abdul-Jabbaar was making a moral pronouncement about the desirability of killing cops, just like I have done. His statements are neither threats nor incitement as far as criminal law is concerned, and the prosecutors know it. They are simply harassing people because they know they can get away with it. This is all the more reason why protests are needed too, because America clearly has a huge problem with police brutality and corrupt prosecutors.

On the other hand, it looks like Michael Brown's stepfather, Louis Head, actually committed a textbook example of inciting a riot:

When you step onto a platform above a crowd and shout "Burn this bitch down!" and there is an imminent risk that they might actually do it, then that's the type of situation the law I was charged with is supposed to apply to. A specific situation where you incite specific people to commit specific crimes. My case did not come anywhere close to that, and the police lawyers knew it. I am not even arguing that the incitement law is a bad law here (though it might be); it was simply never meant to apply to the kind of speech I have committed, even when the Internet is defined as a public venue.

When cops and prosecutors are corrupt, this leaves us with the courts to restore justice. Hopefully the case against Abdul-Jabbaar will be dismissed, or else freedom of speech in America is in serious trouble.

Meanwhile I am waiting for the judgment in my compensation case, which is due within the next few days.

It looks to me like Abdul-Jabbar's case is one the FBI trying to make an example of someone (much like your case). Even if gets dismissed, it causes people to think twice about what they say for fear 'Big Brother' is watching.

Yes, American prosecutors are notoriously corrupt. They win political points and public notoriety the more aggressive they are.

That's why it is important that we set an example back and sue them for wrongful prosecution. Getting that message out to the public is more important to me than the relatively small amount of money I might be awarded.

Yes, the banksters will starve. And so will we. There is no happy ending to this. It will probably be deflation all the way now until the system is broken. Maybe the central banks can manage to turn it around to hyperinflation (why not try helicopter drops?), which will still produce the same result in the end, but I doubt it.

Notice that the powers that be don't even have a plan for degrowing the economy while preserving the most useful aspects of industrial civilization. They must have (correctly) concluded that it would be impossible, so they single-mindedly pursue growth at any cost until the whole system fails.

After reading "The End of Growth" by Richard Heinberg and Ellen Brown's "Web of Debt" it becomes clear that the reason we are locked into a system of cancerous economic growth is that credit and currency is issued by private financial interests as a profit. The tragic thing is that 80 years ago one European nation proved to the world that it didn't need to be this way. Currency could instead be issued by the state according to the production of the people. This would have made it easy to make the transition to a steady state economy when needed. Sadly, that nation was then destroyed by a war in large part caused by the vested financial interests that have led us to collapse. Humanity had a chance to progress to a higher level of civilisation neither capitalist nor communist but we blew it.

People don't want to change the system simply because capitalism is the best system available to exploit and deplete the ecosystems we live in, according to our greedy and short sighted biology.

"The biologist Jared Diamond published in 2005 the book Collapse: How societies choose to fail or survive. He summarizes how native populations and cultures that have ‘advanced’ in technology, have, without exception, expanded above carrying boundaries, destroying their own foundation for life. And then they collapsed. There are no historical examples of native populations who cared about anything else than short sighted gain. Human cultures have in the past only been restricted by technological limitations in using up resources, not by their nobility. There is a clear boundary between those cultures who remained at a hunter/gatherer level, in which some still exist, and cultures which developed technology or grew their populations to change the ecosystems they depended upon. All the latter-mentioned cultures are gone, except for the one we live in today. The world’s earlier cultures, like ours today, are a history of how people used all available means to fight for, exploit and deplete the ecosystems they lived in. Regardless of culture, people of all eras struggled and fought for food, place, benefits and values that are connected to the two powers of selection: To get what’s needed to secure nurturing for children and family (natural selection), and to become an attractive partner (sexual selection)." — The Biological Human Being, by Terje Bongard and Eivin Røskaft, page 239

If people are free to follow their short sighted nature they feel free, if we will all die they don't care.

I will encourage everyone to eat really well this Christmas. You may don't get so many more chances.

Re: As a reader of Gail Tverberg's blog Our Finite World, I am privy to the fact that our world is soon collapsing. ... While I would love to be proven wrong, I have almost as much confidence in Gail's prediction of imminent collapse as the Second Law of thermodynamics, to which it is closely related... Read Gail's posts and comments, check her references and especially pay attention to the way she replies to all comments and convincingly debunks any kind of optimism, and it shall be intuitive to you too that we are collapsing.

*~~~~~* *~~~~~* *~~~~~* *~~~~~* Except of Invitation which was sent to Ms. Gail Tverberg to support the implementation of an Ecology of Peace international law social contract for orderly and humane deindustrialization and depopulation. No response received. Full text of invitation available at EoP PoW Geneva Convention Amendments: Submission Documentation: Legal Supporters & Correspondence: Supporters - Read Receipts (PDF).*~~~~~* *~~~~~* *~~~~~* *~~~~~*

If you seriously and honourably support the submission to the Swiss Federal Council -- to implement MILINT Earth Day due process solutions to honourably de-industrialize and humanely reduce planetary population and consumption to ecological carrying capacity limits including the adoption of an international law social contract requiring all the worlds religious, racial and cultural tribes to restrict their members consumption and procreation to ecological carrying capacity limits -- please respond with a ‘Read Receipt’.

Your ‘read receipt’ support shall then be included as attached ‘supporters’ for the submission to the Swiss Federal Council; once Presidents Obama and Putin, the Pentagon, CIA, FSB, NATO et al officials; have concluded there is sufficient support for the submission not to be emasculated, of its fundamental MILINT Earth Day principles.

‘Not Read’ responses shall be interpreted as follows:

You did not read the invitation; or Notice of Legal Argument objection.

If your ‘not read’ response is a result of your objection to the Military Necessity CommonSism arguments to implement international legislation to limit the ‘right to breed’ and ‘right to consume’ to carrying capacity limits; to orderly address ecological overshoot and climate collapse; to be submitted to the Swiss Federal Council.

You are invited to submit a brief with your legal argument, and evidence for your legal argument; within two weeks of your ‘not read’ response ‘notice to object’. .......... [ continued ]

-- end excerpt --

FTR: A copy of this comment is posted to Transcript of Comments Correspondence [PDF]: RE: Former MILED Clerk Ecology of Peace v War is Peace culture NWO Negotiations [PDF].